Review: Murphy’s Grammar in Use App

Raymond Murphy’s English Grammar in Use was first published by Cambridge University Press in 1985 and has been the go-to grammar book for hundreds of thousands of learners and teachers around the world since then. With the print version now in its fourth edition, CUP have recently released the book in app form. The app is priced at £1.49 but only with limited units, additional units are available for purchase in individual chapters, or all together as a full bundle. The app is aimed at intermediate learners and contains 145 units in total, each with explanations and exercises. There is no need for connectivity with the app and it can be used offline at any time.

The grammar explanations

On entering the app, learners are given 6 units from the ‘Past and Present’ chapter to choose from, each with explanations and exercises, in the same format as the printed version. For each set of exercises, the questions begin with a focus on the meaning of some lexis, in the context of sentences or a paragraph, before moving onto morphological and syntactic aspects of the grammar point being focused on. Some exercises focus more on form, others more on meaning and use of the example words and phrases. At the end of each set of exercises learners are prompted to move to the next section. As learners answer the questions they are able to check the answers, or can move on without doing so. They can redo exercises if they wish and can skip through without completing, much like a learner can with the printed version.

Pages can be bookmarked to be looked at later, and there is a glossary of all the big name grammar terms. Learners who are unsure of where to start can do a diagnostic test called a ‘Study guide’, where they attempt questions on various topics, check their answers and then get suggested units that contain information that would help them with those topic areas.

Pros

The main menu. Choose your unit

The main plus points here are the breadth and depth of the subject matter, and the focus on form. There are 1000s of exercise that focus the learner’s attention on how to make a huge variety of grammatically correct sentences and which situations to use them in. They are able to check their answers and find out what they did wrong, and always have detailed explanations on hand to help with a lack of understanding.

The quality of the content is high, the explanations are well and clearly worded, with illustrations to make the meaning of the texts and sentences clearer. There are audio versions of the example sentences and the exercises themselves are, if not exciting, then at least what learners have come to know and expect.

Using the app will likely improve learner autonomy as learners are forced to look up things themselves, find explanations for wrong answer and work through at their own pace. This could be seen as a disadvantage, but some learners would enjoy and benefit from the independence.

Cons

From an educational perspective the main weaknesses are around the lack of output, and opportunities for personalisation. The content is rigid and static, with no open questions or requests for thoughts and opinions. The exercise types are repetitive and boring.

But how many did I get right?

There are lots of opportunities for practice and recycling, but the app itself doesn’t encourage learners to practice certain parts again, or suggest areas to return to in order to aid acquisition, there is nothing adaptive. In terms of learner control, there is so little structure and support that learners may find themselves confused or bored. Clearly some people will enjoy working through such a large mass of content one exercise at a time, but as apps become more engaging with features designed at keeping users active for longer, such freedom in terms of control may end up being too much for many users.

My overall progress!

In terms of user experience, it seems odd that learners are able to skip over questions without answering them, and can answer wrongly, not ask for feedback and then continue without ever getting corrected on what they chose. At the end of a set of questions, a screen pops up saying that the user has finished, but doesn’t even say how many they got right, wrong or didn’t answer. These affordances of mobile technology are what should differentiate apps from books and it seems odd that the app doesn’t take advantage of them at all. When looking at the progress within a unit, all the progress points remain white, rather than going green or red as I get them right or wrong. These usability issues are so striking that it seems in fact that they may well be bugs.

The app is priced at £1.49, but contains so little content that it is basically worthless unless the user buys more units. Here again the user experience falls short as the pop-up box asking me if I want to buy doesn’t tell me how much the in-app purchase will cost. I therefore had to go back to itunes to see how much I would be charged for adding extra units (£1.49 each chapter or all units for £11.99). The apple guidelines for designing your in-app purchases clearly state that you should display the name and cost of each purchase item, so it seems very odd that this wasn’t done for this product. And from a business perspective, it must put a lot of people off buying.

There is also a lot of metalanguage used in the app, and whilst there is a glossary, this product is really only of use for an intermediate plus user. There is no support in languages other than English and so all explanations of grammar points has to be comprehended in the target language. Whilst this may constitute effective language input, the texts are not representative of real world reading and also exclude lower level learners.

Murphy's Grammar in Use App

Pedagogy and Methodology

Instructional Design

User Experience

Cost and Access

Summary

This is a very simple way of repackaging a very successful product in a format that will make it accessible and more easily transportable for a wider market. Unfortunately it doesn’t do anything new or exciting in the process. The quality of the content is high, as it was nearly 30 years ago when it was written (although the app store states that the 'explanations and exercises have been written by Raymond Murphy specially for smartphones and tablets' the texts in the first chapter of print version and app are the same!), there are lots of exercises for learners to do and the explanations are clear and concise. The subject matter is dealt with in depth, but there are no opportunities to produce language and little or no chance of personalising or being creative.

The affordances of the technology are not utilised, there is no adaptive element to the product and even feedback isn’t given or progress visibly tracked (unless this is a bug!). The move to a mobile app could have been used as an opportunity to make this product more exciting, more modern and more effective as a language learning tool, instead it seems to be a fairly bland copy of a best-selling book.

But, as the old saying goes, ‘If it ain’t broke...’ and maybe we can’t blame CUP for not pushing the boat out when the original and safe option is such a money spinner. But my personal feeling is that they should have aimed higher and tried to achieve something new, exciting and relevant for learners. I feel a lot more effort should have been put into ensuring that the user experience was effective and that this product will fall below expected standards for a lot of learners, meaning that the quality of the content is not able to reach it’s potential.

However, on this occasion there was not full consensus in the ELTjam team and there were a few points that seemed especially divisive! We realise it’s uncharacteristic to end a review with questions to the readers, but as the in-house debate was lively, we thought we’d open it up. The scores above are an average of all of our ratings. There was an average standard deviation across the review criteria of 0.74, and the areas with the highest standard deviation value and the things there seemed to be most discussion about informed the four questions below:

1. Is the original book form effective as a language learning tool?

2. Can a language learning product be good even if it doesn't include opportunities for output, personalisation and creativity?

3. Should a product structure and manage the practice and recycling of language, or is it OK to leave this entirely up to the learner?

4. Can a product score highly for comprehensible input when the sentences don't form part of longer texts, and when the focus is on structure rather than overall meaning?

2.9

9 Comments

I’d love to have been present at that eltjam discussion!
Sounds like they are (probably correctly) counting on the brand name to sell their app for them rather than innovating at all. It’s just an ebook. Whether that shortsighted plan will affect the brand will be interesting. especially as young students might be meeting with this book for the first time and be much less impressed than earlier generations of students for whom this is the go to grammar book.
Good news for someone who can steal Murphy’s crown in the app world and maybe then make a paper book off the back of their superior app’s success and market penetration!
As for Q4, that’s an oft levelled criticism of poor quality materials and for an author that’s made so much money, it should be better! Duolingo is at least free and suffering from a similar weakness.
I wonder how involved the author was with this incarnation. You’d hope he cares how good the app is AND that the publisher allowed him to care AND that an editor had the power to mediate between the two. Why do I doubt all three of those apply?

With regard to Q4, the lack of context and extended texts isn’t some kind of oversight or a sign of poor quality – it’s (for better or worse) quite deliberate and core to the whole approach of the book, which is to focus on form only and avoid anything that might distract from that. I think Scott’s comparison with a dictionary is right – think of the example sentences you get alongside the definitions in a dictionary. Although I agree that in this case, it might be nice to have some longer texts and listenings as an optional extra or extension.

Thanks for posting this review Jo. I’m not surprised that a digital version of a book that’s close to 30 years old has caused some debate! I should declare before I address a few of your points that I work for Cambridge, and I’m involved in marketing this app, but these comments don’t necessarily represent the views of my employer, or the author (who was central to the development of the app’s content and cares very much about all versions of Grammar in Use).
Firstly, on a practical note, I recommend you uninstall and reinstall the app. We updated it soon after launch to fix some of the usability bugs that you refer to. And the price of your in-app purchase appears in the final stage of the purchase process. In response to customer feedback, we’ve also dropped the Starter Pack price down to 69p / $0.99.
One of the key points I’d like to pick up on though is how Grammar in Use is intended to be used. It’s a grammar reference and practice resource, not a course book, and therefore something learners dip in to as and when they need to. Adaptive learning for a product like this really wouldn’t be appropriate. However, your point about the potential for more variety in exercises types is well made, and may be something that could be addressed in later updates. The other issue you mention, the level, is also something that could be addressed later, through development of an Essential (and Advanced) Grammar in Use app, and bilingual versions are also a possibility. This app really is just a starting point, as the intermediate level book was 29 years ago.
Finally, in an attempt to answer your four questions:
1. Yes, personally I think it is, if it’s used as the author intended (reference and practice outside of the classroom, to help clarify understanding).
2. Yes. See above.
3. This is where the teacher comes in, right? But without a teacher, ideally yes, a product should attempt to help with the language learning process. I’m sure the ELT Jammers will have views on how and whether digital products can effectively do this.
4. Perhaps some users of English Grammar in Use would like to answer this one?

Let me first say that your reviews are both well-informed (by learning theory, among other things) and balanced. Full marks.

Regarding your four questions.

1. Is the original book form effective as a language learning tool?

Depending on how it’s used: as a reference source (the original intention) then – like a dictionary – it supplies point-of-need data on language, with the added benefit of exercises to test understanding. Grinding through it unit by unit, though, (as is the custom in many contexts, including here in the US) would seem to be less beneficial, since there is little or no evidence that the kind of explicit knowledge that is gained thereby readily translates into implicit knowledge that is available for real-time language use – the perennial challenge for all second language instruction. On the other hand, the motivational potential for certain learner types of working through grammar exercises incrementally and getting immediate feedback (which this app doesn’t seem to supply or save – judging by your review) can’t be over-estimated – what might be called its ‘face validity’.

2. Can a language learning product be good even if it doesn’t include opportunities for output, personalisation and creativity?

3. Should a product structure and manage the practice and recycling of language, or is it OK to leave this entirely up to the learner?

This would seem to be a wasted opportunity. I use a dictionary app to help me when reading in Spanish, and what I particularly like about it is the fact that it saves all my previous searches, which I can consult any time (and which I’d be hard-pushed to remember without such an aid). Even better if it were linked to a quick (30-second) test activity.

4. Can a product score highly for comprehensible input when the sentences don’t form part of longer texts, and when the focus is on structure rather than overall meaning?

To its credit, the success of (print) Murphy is due in large measure to the comprehensibility (for learners) of its grammar explanations and its exercises – pitched at input minus 1, as it were, so that processing demands don’t interfere with understanding of the grammar point in question. On the other hand, it’s well-established that the range (and therefore the choice) of many grammar items extends beyond the immediate sentence. Think of the notion of ‘definiteness’ (which determines choice of article and aspect, among other things), or of reference (articles again, and pronouns). What makes Murphy attractive to many users, but what is, at the same time, its major weakness, is that it ring-fences grammar off from vocabulary, on the one hand, and discourse on the other. So, yes, more context wouldn’t hurt (and it could be included, in a digital version, in the way that some corpus sites allow you to click on, and view, the complete text from which a concordance line has been extracted). But it might be a tall order to expect the app to remedy these failings.

I think the ebook version probably would be worse if it didn’t take any advantage of the possibilities of its new format. In terms of what was possible with the app, it seems like this product fell short in doing nothing new. So got worse by staying the same!

Hopefully all kinds of edtech ‘animals’ could be run through the criteria and we’d learn something about them as a result. But it is interesting to think about what the product aims to do and how much we take that into account. If the product aims to do nothing new then the owners may see the result as a success, but it could still fall short by other people’s standards.

Two points:
1. Am I the only one who finds the user interface design unengaging? I’d give it one star here.
2. If this is like a dictionary, but the search component is not that important, how is it better than the book? Broadly speaking I prefer reference books in book form so I have a sense of the breadth of the product and can explore it rather than just pick chapters out of it.

I agree Lindsay. It looks, in every way, like the book I see on every shelf in every school I know. I think perhaps this was just an easy option the same as I saw online schools just buy PDF versions of books several years ago. But, why not? From a business perspective, the brand is there and some people, possibly non-natives I feel, will welcome it.

I think there is something similar on e360 that is very popular.

Grammar isn’t fun to learn or teach usually and just putting a reference book onto an iPad won’t change that after the initial ‘oooo, iPad’ reaction. I worked on 2 iPad apps a few years back and, due to the design, had typical grammar explanations followed by lots of practice. To me, this was not ideal but the apps proved quite popular. Now, is that because people are used to that way or is it because they have no other options? I don’t know but what I do know is that many students I have taught and used for testing apps really wanted heavy grammar explanations, some practice and then the next point. Few welcomed personalised or communicative practice or even fun.